Sunday, December 9, 2012

Religion and Militarism in Early 20th Century Japan

By
the end of the 1930s Japan found itself embroiled in the second half of what
later became known as the 15-Year War.After launching offensives in Manchuria and China, Japan neared a time
when it would challenge Western powers, as it had Russia during the
Russo-Japanese War of 1903.Just
as that earlier conflict resulted from it's perception that it needed to
maintain a buffer and gain access to natural resources, the 15-Year War against
China and Western powers in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim resulted from
the Imperial Japanese desire to industrialize and strengthen Japan in relation
to European states.In order to
accomplish this, the Meiji Emperors sought to unify and modernize Japan in
order to face outside threats while simultaneously separating itself from the
corruption of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Religion
became a key tool in unifying the people of Japan behind the Emperor.Identifying Buddhism as inherently
corrupt and emblematic of the Shogunate due to the high profile of Buddhists
under the Tokugawa, the Meiji rejected the traditional amalgam of Shinto and
Buddhism in favor a a new "State Shinto" focused on the person of the
Emperor and the defense of Japan.Adoption of State Shinto resulted in a broad persecution of Buddhists,
including both priests and lay practitioners, as it became officially regarded
as a foreign religion.[i]At the beginning of the Meiji period,
the developing Japanese nationalism required homegrown religion and ideology.[ii]Not content to adopt the new Imperial
religion or to face persecution, some Japanese Buddhists took the opportunity
to reform Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, to address charges of corruption
and to make it "useful" to the state.The main line of argument for this generation of Buddhist
reformers was to show that Zen Buddhism contained the unique spirit of Japan
and that it was steadfastly loyal to the Emperor.Through this reform effort Zen Buddhist leaders not only
embraced Japanese Imperialism, but actively supported it as a matter of both
policy and ideology.[iii]

By
the twentieth century, philosopher and reformer, Inoue Enryo could carry the
Japanese Zen Buddhist argument to the extreme stance that the enemies of Japan
were "also the enemy of the Buddha."While Inoue's view had clear historical precedents reaching
back to sixth and seventh century Chinese Ch'an Buddhism, it developed more as
a direct response to the persecution of Buddhists immediately following the
Meiji Restoration.Writing at the
height of the 15-Year War, Inoue depicted the war as a humanitarian effort to
bring Enlightenment to other nations, particularly in Asia, claiming that,
"it is the conduct of a bodhisattva seeking to save untold millions of
living souls throughout China and Korea from the jaws of death."In this, Inoue echoed Soto Zen
intellectuals Hayashiya Tomojiro and Shimakae Chikai who argued that in “in
order to establish eternal peace in East Asia… we are sometimes accepting and
sometimes forceful.We now have no
choice but to exercise the benevolent forcefulness of ‘killing one so that many
may live’.”[iv]Understanding how a religious tradition
noted in the West for its doctrine of peace and compassion became wedded to
Japanese Imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries requires deeper
examination of Buddhism under the Meiji and its historical roots.

The
change in Buddhist, especially Zen Buddhist, doctrine did not occur in a
vacuum.Criticism of Buddhism for
ethical and economic reasons began under the Tokugawa, but became pronounced
during the first eight years of the Meiji period.Early attacks included disparaging priests as parasites on
the poor, of focus on meditation and chanting rather than productive activity,
and the rejection of separation between self and others.Real persecution of Buddhists finally
occurred during the first eight years of the Meiji.When the government reduced the number of temples in Japan
to one sixth of the pre-Meiji number of 465,049 and allowed priests to marry,
the persecution became so severe that Buddhist leaders believed that the
Emperor would soon ban the religion.The result of the persecution was just the opposite – Zen Buddhism
became a vocal supporter of the Meiji Imperial system and the modernization of
Japan in both economic and military terms.[v]This effort to use Buddhism as a tool
to stabilize Japan and to strengthen it against outside materialism eventually
evolved into support for Japanese imperialism in Asia and the Pacific.[vi]

Western
academics have a tendency to ignore the possibility that individuals, much less
societies, might be motivated by sincere religious devotion.Instead, they tend to look for
political and economic systemic reasons to explain apparent religious fervor.In the case of Zen Buddhist reforms
under the Meiji, systemic reasons for doctrinal changes provide the clearest
explanation for reforms – in order to escape persecution, Zen Buddhist leaders
needed to show that Buddhism was inherently Japanese, loyal to the Emperor, and
useful to the state.One
interpretation is that changes in Japanese Zen Buddhism represent a deliberate
effort to co-opt religion in the service of the state.[vii]The connection between Buddhism and the
Japanese state developed early in the Meiji period, as illustrated by the Pure
Land doctrine.In Japan, the Jodo
Shinsu sect argued that the Pure Land doctrine's association of relative
teaching with civil authority required absolute obedience of followers to the
political hierarchy.This doctrine
not only attacked the moral authority of religions not explicitly aligned with
the government, such as Christianity, but also added religious legitimacy to
government slogans such as "rich country and strong army" or
"revere the emperor and serve the Buddha."[viii]
The efforts of Meiji Buddhists to demonstrate usefulness extended beyond
justifying territorial expansion, to include famine relief, temperance
movements, and work in prisons, but the most critical effort in the eyes of
government and Buddhist leaders remained Zen Buddhist evangelism both in
religious and secular terms.Not
only did Zen proselytizers promote their faith, but they worked to spread the
Imperial ideology.[ix]

Going
beyond mere obedience to the government, D.T. Suzuki argued that all religions
in Japan must align themselves with the state's economic and military
policy.Only by aligning with
these policies could believers remain moral.Suzuki's tortured reasoning is that nations establish armies
not to subjugate others, but to preserve themselves and their own
freedoms.The defense of the nation
against aggression, whether economic or territorial, became a religious duty of
the people.Taking up arms, the
people would seek justice against the aggressor in order to preserve the
progress of humanity toward Enlightenment.[x]

Along
with proselytizing priests and other Japanese intellectuals, Inoue helped
spread knowledge of Zen Buddhism through the West with speaking engagements in
North America.[xi]This group developed and spread the
reformed gospel of Japanese Zen in response to the Meiji persecution of their
faith.They argued that the
solution to the problem of corruption in Buddhist institutions lay in reform,
not persecution.Shin buukyo, or New Buddhism, drew on European Enlightenment
tradition of anti-clericism and social responsibility, and sought to be a
"world religion" – a universal truth for all peoples. This idea of
Japanese Zen Buddhism as a world religion led Inoue to argue that
"Buddhism is the teaching of compassion, a teaching for living human
beings," open to all people.[xii]

Saving
their faith and its adherents from persecution also drove Buddhist leaders to
change the ideology and trappings of Buddhism in Japan.Priests adopted the Shinto robes and
preached a national ethic promoted by the Ministry of Doctrine.Government propaganda became a key
component of Japan's Buddhist message.After Japan's successful military conquests in Manchuria and China,
Buddhism's international acceptance became an asset – it allowed Japan to claim
spiritual and moral authority over its new subjects while also claiming
cultural affinity with them.This
set Japanese colonial and imperial mechanisms apart from those of the West,
with their foreign creeds and ideas.[xiii]

Despite
the new view of Zen Buddhism as a universal religion, or even as the core of
all religions, intellectuals like D.T. Suzuki argued that both Zen and Pure
Land Buddhism captured Japanese spirituality.Because Zen reflected the unique Japanese mentalité, it was
not a foreign religion, but a Japanese one dressed in the trappings of Chinese
Buddhism.The reason for this,
according to Suzuki, was that Zen allowed the spirituality of the samurai class
to fully develop.[xiv]Zen, as the pure essence of Japanese
spirit, became for Suzuki and others like him the "basis for Japanese
character, thought, religious faith, and esthetic tastes."[xv]Further, Zen was the starting point for
a new global faith, and Japan's mission in the world was to Enlighten others.

Inoue
and Suzuki together provide a glimpse at the keys of the relationship between
Zen Buddhism and Japanese Imperial ideology.Both argued for Zen as a universal world religion in the
vein of Christianity or Islam, explicitly arguing for expanding their Faith
through Asia in the areas of Japanese conquest.The martial aspects of Zen also appear in their
ideologies.While Suzuki argued
that Zen permeated Bushido, the code of
Japan's samurai warrior-class that valued self-sacrifice, obedience, and
fearlessness, Inoue made a more direct connection between Buddhism and
warfare.Discussing the potential
for war between Japan and Russia in Manchuria and Siberia, Inoue contended that
despite Buddhism's call for peace, Buddhists should willingly defend Japan
against an aggressive Russia as partial repayment of their "debt of
gratitude" owed the Buddha for a chance at Enlightenment.[xvi]

Suzuki
extended Inoue's argument further in offering five propositions for Buddhists,
that leader’s of Japanese Buddhist institutions adhered to through the end of
World War II.The most important
of these were the principles that countries that opposed Japanese trading
rights should be punished, that all religious groups should fully support
punishing nations that challenged Japanese rights to ensure that justice
prevailed, that soldiers must willingly sacrifice themselves for the state, and
that serving in the military was a religious act.[xvii]This conception of military service as
a religious act had serious consequences for Japane as the doctrine filtered
out from intellectuals like Suzuki into government and the rest of the Japanese
populace.After the end of World
War II, the Rinzai Zen priest Ichikawa Hakugen believed that Suzuki’s fiveprinciples led to holy war in China.Thus, the goal of the Sino-Japanese war
was to simultaneously punish China and promote the spiritual Enlightenment of
the Chinese.That China did not
start the war, or attack Japan did not make an impact on Suzuki’s definition of
the war as fundamentally religious.Ichikawa contended that Buddhists equated the support for the war with support
for the Emperor.[xviii]

To
further promote the connection between Japan’s military and Buddhism through
the lens of Bushido, thus providing additional support for the claim of Zen as
a unique expression of the Japanese spirit, Suzuki claimed that the ethos of
Bushido and that of Zen were the same.In his estimation, the Japanese soldier’s calmness in the face of death
and sense of fairness when dealing with the enemy were borne of Zen training
rather than a pan-Asian ethos.Beyond these traits of the co-mingled Zen-Bushido, Suzuki argued that
Zen taught the discipline Japanese soldiers required for success in
combat.Zen’s focus on a single
goal was key to success in battle.By teaching soldiers to concentrate only on the objective at hand,
ignoring distractions, this warrior ethos ensured Japanese success in war.[xix]Intellectuals did not limit the
practice of Bushido to the ancient samurai class or to modern soldiers.As early as 1905, Nitobe Inazo asserted
that Zen was the “ideal faith , both for a nation full of hope and energy, and
for a person who has to fight his pwn way in the strife of life.”Not content merely to promote Zen as
the way to meet the world’s challenges, Nitobe contended that Bushido should
“be observed not only by the solider on the battlefield, but by every citizen
in the struggle for existence.If
a person be a person and not a beast, then he must be samurai – brave,
generous, upright, faithful, and manly, full of self-respect and self-confidence,
and at the same time full of the spirit of self-sacrifice.”[xx]During the Sino-Japanese phase of the
15-Year War, Suzuki extended his contention that Zen spiritualism enabled
soldiers to unflinchingly face death to the whole of the Japanese populace,
arguing that “the spirit of the samurai deeply breathing Zen into itself
propagated its philosophy even among the masses… even when they are not
particularly trained in the way of the warrior, have imbibed his spirit and are
ready to sacrifice their lives for any cause they think worthy.”[xxi]

The
desire to connect Bushido and Zen worked both ways.Not only did Zen evangelists such as Suzuki and Inoue work
to show the conjoining the two traditions, but so did the Japanese military
leaders like General Araki Sadao and Navy Captain Hirose Yutaka.The military shared Suzuki’s goal of
promoting the ideal of self-sacrifice embodied by Bushido and Zen.Individual recognition mattered little
in the Bushido-Zen ideology, only service to the state by pursuing the warrior
ideal.At the heart of this doctrine
lay Suzuki’s belief, which he shared with Japan’s military leaders, that only
the “Zen-inspired Bushido code” could save Japan after the United States
entered World War II.[xxii]As the war continued into the 1940’s,
with the United States pressing toward Japanese-held areas, Suzuki and other
Buddhist leaders tried to rally the Japanese populace.Building on his and Inoue’s earlier
imagining of the 15-Year War as a holy war, Suzuki exhorted young Buddhists to
fight, writing that the war was nothing less than an “ideological struggle for
the culture of East Asia; Buddhists must join in this struggle for the culture
and accomplish their essential mission.”[xxiii]Suzuki’s intended his clarion call
to young Buddhists to send them with renewed vigor into the holy war to bring
Enlightenment to Asia and defend Japan’s sacred mission against the United
States and its allies.